Supernatural fic: Small Worlds
THIS FIC CAN BE BLAMED ENTIRELY ON nomelon. Were it not for her post about teeny!Jared and her wonderful encouragement, it would never have been written. And hey, I've written a Supernatural fic that isn't angst!
Title: Small Worlds
Fandom: Supernatural
Rating: R, for a tiny bit of language.
Word Count: 3,800ish.
Summary: Sam and Dean are hunting a Gorgon. Which would be annoying enough even if Sam hadn't somehow shrunk to ten inches tall.
Warnings: Set at some point between 'Tall Tales' and 'All Hell Breaks Loose'; very mild spoilers for 'Tall Tales'.
Disclaimer: These characters do not belong to me.
Author's Notes: Dedicated with thanks and love to nomelon. There are no pairings in here, but you're welcome to read as much or as little into it as you like.
They’ve been in a lot of weird situations, but this is a new one. They don’t know what caused it or why, and so Dean has absolutely no idea of what to do. Apart from mock his brother, of course.
“This is obviously karma,” Dean says.
“Karma for what?” Sam demands, folding his tiny arms.
“Being too tall,” Dean says. “It’s about time you found out what it was like to be a normal person.”
“Dean,” Sam says, “normal people are generally more than a foot tall.”
Dean shrugs. “A normal person standing next to you, then.”
“I’m not that tall,” Sam mutters.
“Well, not now.”
Sam punches him. It’s not very effective.
-
Obviously, with his new little legs, Sam can’t keep up with Dean. Dean thinks that this is the most excellent thing in the world and begins walking a little more briskly than usual just so Sam has to run full-tilt alongside him.
When Dean has reached his destination, his destination being ‘just far away enough from his starting point for his newly-miniaturised brother to be completely exhausted’, Sam braces himself against a nearby flowerpot to catch his breath for a moment, then climbs up Dean’s pant leg until he’s close enough to make proper eye contact and gives him a look of purest hatred.
“Oh, fine,” Dean says. “You can ride on my shoulder until we figure this out.”
Sam dodges Dean’s fingers - “Dean. You're not picking me up” - and climbs up to his shoulder himself. He leans against the side of Dean's face, holding onto the hair at the back of his neck with tiny fingers.
“I hope I turn back to normal size when I’m still sitting on you,” he mutters. “Jerk.”
-
The problem with the situation - well, one of the problems, at least - is that the supernatural world isn’t going to put itself on hold just because Dean’s brother is suddenly small enough to fit in his pocket. They need to figure out what's happened to him, sure, but there are still people to be saved, and hell if Dean’s going to let them die just because he’s too busy trying to make his brother’s situation less hilarious.
They're pretty sure the thing they’re looking for here is a Gorgon, because there aren’t many other explanations when people start mysteriously disappearing and leaving perfect statues of themselves in a nearby forest, so Sam is busy researching the freaky things on his laptop in their motel room. It’s taking him frickin’ forever, ’cause he has to crawl over the keyboard and push each key down individually, but he glares whenever Dean tries to help out.
“I can do this, Dean,” he snaps, swatting Dean’s comparatively-huge finger away and losing his balance in the process. He falls face-first onto the keys. A row of ‘x’s marches across the screen.
Dean slides a hand under his brother’s belly and lifts him gently off the keyboard. Sam glares daggers at him, his arms and legs dangling. He really, really hates being picked up like this. Which is a pity, because Dean loves picking him up. It makes him feel like a giant.
“If you don’t put me down,” Sam says, “I’m going to hide in your pants and tell every girl who unzips them that you’ve got chlamydia.”
Dean lets go. Sam yelps and twists in mid-air and lands with a hilariously indignant noise on the bed.
There’s only one bed in the room; Sam was hiding when Dean checked in, clinging to the inside of his jacket, and ordering two queens for one person would’ve looked pretty weird. Besides, as Dean takes great delight in pointing out, the brand new pocket-sized Sam isn't exactly going to need a whole queen bed to himself.
Pocket-sized Sam rolls over onto his stomach, crawls up the comforter to the head of the bed and sprawls full-length over the pillow.
“Hey,” Dean says, nudging Sam’s foot with a finger. “I get the bed. I’m not the one who can fit in a box, remember?”
“Screw you,” Sam mutters into the pillow. “I’m not sleeping in the box.”
“Come on, Sammy,” Dean says, exasperated. “I’ve lined it with cotton balls and everything.”
“I’m not a hamster, Dean,” Sam says, rolling over to glare at him. Sam’s been doing a lot of glaring since this started. Dean’s not sure he realises exactly how unintimidating he is.
-
They try sharing at first, Sam under strict instructions to stay on his fifth of the bed, but he can’t sleep; the blankets completely dwarf him, weighing too heavily on his chest, and he can’t get comfortable. Midway through the night he nudges Dean awake and asks for one of his T-shirts. Dean, despite being half-asleep and a little confused, manages to comply, and Sam curls up in the shirt and falls asleep on the pillow, his tiny breaths barely rustling Dean’s hair.
-
The next morning, Sam rolls over and yawns, then screws up his face. “I really need a shower.”
“You can’t have a shower,” Dean, who has spent the past twenty minutes trying to resist the urge to buy a helium balloon and tie his sleeping miniature brother to it, says. “You’ll drown.”
Sam blinks his eyes open, clearly confused, and then lets them fall closed again in exasperation when he remembers what’s happened to him. When what Dean has said registers, he re-opens them in order to give him an incredulous look. “How short do you think I am?”
“The water drops’ll knock you over or something. I don’t know; something just tells me that putting a little you in a man-size shower’s probably a bad idea.”
“Okay, fine,” Sam says, rolling his eyes. “What am I supposed to do, then?”
Dean takes a moment to consider this.
“I guess I could hold you under the faucet or something,” he says.
“Dude,” Sam says, staring. “I’d be naked.”
“So?”
“So I’m not having you holding me when I’m naked. It’s bad enough when I’ve got my pants on.”
“Oh, come on,” Dean says. “You’re ten inches tall. It’s too weird to be inappropriate.”
“I’ll just wash in the sink,” Sam mutters.
-
Sam has trouble reading the laptop screen when he’s this small, and so, after struggling for some time, he gives up and officially delegates the research for this case to Dean. Dean complains, but, as his method of research consists mainly of pulling corrupted snippets of legends from his not-entirely-reliable memory and waiting for Sam to refute them, it’s not as arduous a task as he makes out.
“So all we have to do is get this ugly sonofabitch to look at itself in the mirror, right?” Dean asks. “Easy.”
“Uh, no,” Sam says. “I don’t think that’s it.”
“Why not? It’s what the Greek guy did.”
“Perseus,” Sam says. “And no, it isn’t. What he did was use the reflection in his shield so he could behead her without looking directly at her. If the reflection turned people to stone, he wouldn’t have survived.”
“You think it has to be a beheading, then?” Dean asks. “We can’t just shoot it? What if we send you in and have you hack at its ankles until it dies of blood loss?”
“Well,” Sam says, perching on the edge of the keyboard, “as Gorgon blood apparently turns into poisonous snakes, that probably wouldn’t be such a good idea. Although I guess not being at her eye level might be an advantage. If, you know, I could actually wield a sword like this.”
Dean groans. “Swords? You’re kidding. It’s got to be a sword?”
“Well, that’s what Perseus used,” Sam says, frowning. “I guess he didn’t have that many options at the time, though.”
“Sam,” Dean says, leaning forward, “has anyone tried shooting a Gorgon?”
-
They try shooting the Gorgon. It doesn’t work.
The first three shots don’t work because aiming when you’re blindfolded and your tiny brother is shouting directions up from where he’s tied to your leg is really fucking difficult. Sam’s being annoyingly cautious about this case, pointing out that they don’t know a real-life Gorgon’s reflection won’t be deadly, and when they called Bobby to ask he just thought they’d gone crazy because apparently nobody’s come across one of these for three billion years or something, so there’s not much hope of getting any more information. Which is why Sam, so low down he won’t be able to look into the bitch’s eyes unless he tries really hard, is yelling, “Left! Left! Okay, I think you might be aiming too low for a heart-shot. Go up a little. I don’t know, about an inch? Hey, you try giving directions when all you can look at is someone’s legs.”
The fourth and fifth shots don’t work because apparently bullets just don’t have much of an effect on Gorgons, and that’s when they find out that Gorgons can run really fast when they’re pissed off.
Dean tears off the blindfold in their flight, and he bolts through the forest and back to the Impala. They don’t know when it gives up the pursuit, because they can’t look back.
-
Obviously, Sam’s only got one set of clothes in his size - well, he was wearing like three shirts when he got tinified, so it’s not that bad, but he still doesn’t seem to think it’s enough - and so, because Dean is a good brother, he goes out early the next morning and comes back with a bag full of dolls’ clothes.
Sam doesn’t seem to appreciate his thoughtfulness. And, all right, so maybe most of what Dean’s got is a bit frillier than what his brother usually wears, but it still seems pretty ungrateful.
“You’d probably look great in it,” Dean says, dangling the blue-and-white Little Bo Peep frock in front of him. “You need to open your mind, Sammy.”
“I really wish you’d enjoy this less.”
-
Of course, all of this is more to put off the ‘what next?’ conversation than anything else, because guns won’t work and Dean’s got a feeling Sam’s not going to like his latest sudden flash of inspiration.
The feeling turns out to be pretty accurate.
“It’s a Scooby-Doo plan,” Sam says, incredulous.
“Hey, the Scoobies always got the bad guy in the end. You won’t let me use a mirror, and I really don’t feel like a blindfolded swordfight, so this is the only option we’ve got.”
“There’s got to be something else,” Sam says. “Something less... stupid.”
“How tall do you think it is?” Dean asks, ignoring him.
“My height perception’s a little thrown off right now, Dean,” Sam says, gesturing at the clock radio he’s sitting on. “Maybe we should go with the reflection thing after all. I mean, everything else we know about her stays pretty close to the myth.”
“You said its blood turns into snakes,” Dean points out. “Did it bleed when I shot it?”
“There was some blood before it healed, but I didn’t see any snakes.” Sam hesitates, then says, reluctantly, “Okay, so we probably shouldn’t risk it.”
“I got it in the heart, right? So...” Dean closes his eyes and mimics aiming a gun, trying to remember. “It’s probably about your height. Well,” he adds, with a grin, because he can’t help himself, “not any more.”
“As soon as we fix this height thing,” Sam says, “I’m never speaking to you again.”
-
Dean’s pretty sure that Sam keeps directing him into trees on purpose. He’d yell, but he doesn’t want to let the Gorgon know they’re around before they have to. And, if he’s totally honest with himself, he does kind of deserve it.
“I can see her legs,” Sam says, grimly. “I think she’s facing away from us, but turn around before you take the blindfold off.”
Dean pulls off the blindfold and stares fixedly at the tree in front of him as he unties his brother from his leg. As soon as he’s free, Sam turns to make sure their target hasn’t heard them.
“Seriously, Sam,” Dean says, quietly. “You don’t want to do this, we won’t do it.”
Sam laughs. “Well, it’s good to know you care.”
“You want to figure something else out?”
“Nah.” Sam pats him on the ankle. It’s probably supposed to be a reassuring gesture, but it’s a little freaky, because those tiny tiny hands will never not be weird. “I figure it’ll be good to know I can still do something when I’m like this.”
Dean grins. “Okay. Yell if you need me to get you out of there.” He really hopes that Sam’s not going to need to be rescued, because trying to find his little-in-more-than-one-sense brother without looking into the eyes of the thing chasing him isn’t really his idea of fun, but if it comes down to it they both know he’ll jump in.
Sam nods and sets off. Dean watches him go, then, remembering that he’s going to be in a lot of trouble if the Gorgon turns around, turns and escapes through the trees.
-
It turns out to be more difficult to provoke a Gorgon than Sam expected. Shooting her managed it last time, but he doesn’t have a gun, and he’s pretty sure he wouldn’t be able to handle it even if he did. He tries calling her an ‘ugly whore’, unconsciously mimicking Dean’s voice as he says it, but she seems unperturbed; perhaps she doesn’t understand, or she can tell it’s half-hearted, or perhaps insulting mythical monsters is just an incredibly stupid strategy. He almost looks up to see if she has a readable expression before catching himself.
One thing that makes this easier is the fact that Gorgons apparently don’t have human levels of intelligence. Sam’s not sure he’d want to face something smart enough to figure out that all it has to do to make his job a whole lot harder is crouch down. As it is, he’s pretty sure she doesn’t actually know why her stare of death isn’t working on him. Now he just has to get her pissed enough to try to kill him by other means.
So he picks up a rock and throws it at her.
It’s a tiny, tiny rock, small enough to fit comfortably in his much-smaller-than-usual hand, and she barely seems to notice. When he finds a larger pebble and flings it, she makes a grunting noise and the snakes on her head hiss, but that’s it. He can’t throw large things and he can’t throw with much strength, and if he takes too long Dean’s going to assume he’s in trouble and come charging in to get himself killed, so he’s got to try something different, and words cannot express how little he wants to do this but it’s the only idea he’s got.
As luck would have it, it turns out that Gorgons really, really don’t like it when tiny people try to climb up their legs. She roars, and Sam leaps off and backs away quickly, and then she gives chase and fuck, fuck, because Gorgons can run stupidly fast and tiny Sams really can’t and whose brilliant idea was this again?
Sam runs as hard as he can, dodging between trees and through snarled Gorgon fingers, and he knows, he knows he’s going to be caught and fed to this woman’s hair and he can’t call for help because then Dean will die too and he was concentrating so hard on getting away that he probably isn’t even going in the right direction and -
- and then he spots the two trees with the white paint splashed across them as a marker and dives between them, the Gorgon so close he can feel the rags she wears brushing his arm, but only one of them is tall enough to have her head cut off by the razor-thin wire stretched between the trunks.
-
“In the legend, the Gorgon’s head could still turn people to stone even after she’d died,” is the first thing Sam says to Dean when they meet at the edge of the forest.
Dean raises his eyebrows. “You got it, then?” he asks, carefully not letting on how relieved he is or how fucking frustrating it is to know that your brother is in danger and not to be able to help.
“Pretty sure,” Sam says. He tries to climb up Dean’s leg to get to his shoulder, but he’s clearly exhausted, and Dean takes pity on him and scoops him up into his hands. Sam gives him a half-hearted glare. “I heard something hit the ground, anyway. Didn’t turn around, because, y’know.” He glances back the way he came. “How do we stop some kid finding the head and getting himself killed?”
Dean grins.
-
When Sam starts calling for help from the bathroom, Dean keeps watching the news for just long enough to make sure everything’s under control before opening the door. Sam may be able to bathe in the sink, but he can’t get into or out of it on his own, so he needs Dean to lift him up. It’s one of those things they don’t talk about.
“What’re they saying about the forest fire?” Sam asks, as Dean wraps him in a hand towel. “Dean, just give me the towel, I’ll do it.”
“Yeah, they’re pretty sure it’s arson,” Dean says. “Didn’t get to any residential areas, though. Thanks to the helpful, handsome young man who called 911 before it could get too out of control.” He nods toward the screen, deliberately widening his eyes. “They’re thinking the aim was to cover up a murder, ’cause they found a body that had been ‘mysteriously beheaded’ before it was burned. Haven’t been able to identify it yet.”
Sam just frowns. Dean passes him a celebratory bottle-cap of beer, but he ignores it.
“Dean,” he says, after a moment. “What are we going to do about my height?”
“We have to do something? I kind of like you like this. It means you don’t keep running off on your own.”
“I’m serious, Dean,” Sam says, disappearing under the towel and dragging his clothes with him. A couple of minutes later, he emerges again, fully-dressed. “I can’t just live like this.”
And maybe Dean was only half-joking when he said it’s good to know where Sam is all the time, but he knows it’s true. “Yeah, all right,” he says, digging his cell out from under his jacket. “I’ll call Bobby.”
-
Dean knows Bobby’s still there, because he can hear his breathing down the line, but this is a hell of a long pause. Not that he wasn’t expecting it.
“Right,” Bobby says, eventually. “Just making sure I heard right: Sam’s...?”
“Ten inches tall,” Dean confirms.
“Ten inches tall.”
“Maybe eight; I don’t know. We haven’t broken out a tape measure or anything.”
“Okay,” Bobby says, slowly. “I’m not sure the exact height is the problem here. And, what, you just forgot to mention this when you called me about that Gorgon?”
“We had other things to take care of,” Dean says, with an entirely pointless shrug. “You ever hear of anything like this happening before?”
Another pause. Shorter, but not by much.
“No.”
“Right,” Dean says, glancing over at his brother. Sam is trying to read the newspaper he left on the bed, but he’s obviously having trouble; he has to walk over the pages as he reads, because he’s too close to the text to read it all from one point. “Only I was kind of hoping you’d know how to fix it.”
“You say you weren’t fighting anything when it happened?” Bobby asks. “You were just walking along?”
“Yeah, that’s right.”
“Probably a Trickster,” Bobby says. “Elves might be able to do something like that, but they’d need to be provoked. A Trickster could just have been bored.”
“Honestly, I’d have expected you to figure it out sooner,” Sam says.
Dean whips around, forgetting the phone. Sam is leaning against the headboard of the bed, smirking in a way that doesn’t seem like him at all.
“I mean, you’ve already taken on a Trickster, right?” Sam asks, inspecting his miniature fingernails. “And you still needed your beloved Bobby to tell you what you were dealing with. I’d have thought it’d be more memorable than that.”
Dean grabs for his gun. Sam raises his eyebrows.
“Yeah, I wouldn’t do that. You wouldn’t want to hurt your brother, would you?”
“You’re not my brother,” Dean says, keeping the handgun trained on him.
“Maybe not, but I’m borrowing his body. If you want it back in one piece, I’d suggest you put the gun down.”
Dean doesn’t lower the gun. Sam rolls his eyes.
“Look, even if you shoot you won’t kill me. I’m just trying to keep you from doing anything stupid. Believe it or not, I actually like you two.”
“You’ve been in there the whole time?” Dean asks, ignoring him.
Sam laughs. “Of course not. Where’s the fun if I don’t get to see how much it annoys little Sammy?”
“Change him back,” Dean says. “And don’t call him that.”
“Oh, fine,” Sam says. “If you want to be boring.” And then he’s tall again. There’s no weird wavy light effect or puff of smoke or anything; Sam’s just suddenly a giant again, and all is well in the world. Or would be, if it weren’t for the fact that a freakin’ Trickster is still possessing Dean’s brother.
“Get out,” Dean says.
“What? I’m Sam! Can’t you tell from my puppy eyes and repression?”
“Get out,” Dean says, “or I swear I’ll figure out a way to kill you.”
“Yeah, like that’s a threat. Your Trickster-killing track record isn’t as good as you think it is, y’know.”
Dean blinks. “What?”
Sam winks at him, and then he’s doubled over, coughing, and Dean immediately forgets everything the Trickster just said. He rushes over to steady him, and Sam looks at him with an expression of confusion that’s all Sam, and Dean is almost relieved enough to hug him. Almost.
They stay there for a moment, holding onto each other, and then Dean becomes aware of the phone he left on the floor. Bobby is calling his name down the line. Dean picks it up.
“Dean, I swear, if you don’t say something in the next five seconds I’m coming down there myself.”
“It’s fine,” Dean says. “Everything’s fine. Sam’s back to normal. Well, not ‘normal’, but you know what I mean.”
Bobby says something in response, but Dean doesn’t catch it because Sam has just whacked him on the back of the head.
“It was a Trickster, like you said,” Dean explains, rubbing his skull. “I think it’s over now, though.”
“You sure?” Bobby asks, and Dean can hear the frown in his voice. “Tricksters aren’t known for giving up easy.”
“Pretty sure,” Dean says. “I mean, I think we’re both okay.”
-
Dean wakes up in Sam’s pocket, and he’s never seen Sam looking so gleeful in his life.
Title: Small Worlds
Fandom: Supernatural
Rating: R, for a tiny bit of language.
Word Count: 3,800ish.
Summary: Sam and Dean are hunting a Gorgon. Which would be annoying enough even if Sam hadn't somehow shrunk to ten inches tall.
Warnings: Set at some point between 'Tall Tales' and 'All Hell Breaks Loose'; very mild spoilers for 'Tall Tales'.
Disclaimer: These characters do not belong to me.
Author's Notes: Dedicated with thanks and love to nomelon. There are no pairings in here, but you're welcome to read as much or as little into it as you like.
They’ve been in a lot of weird situations, but this is a new one. They don’t know what caused it or why, and so Dean has absolutely no idea of what to do. Apart from mock his brother, of course.
“This is obviously karma,” Dean says.
“Karma for what?” Sam demands, folding his tiny arms.
“Being too tall,” Dean says. “It’s about time you found out what it was like to be a normal person.”
“Dean,” Sam says, “normal people are generally more than a foot tall.”
Dean shrugs. “A normal person standing next to you, then.”
“I’m not that tall,” Sam mutters.
“Well, not now.”
Sam punches him. It’s not very effective.
-
Obviously, with his new little legs, Sam can’t keep up with Dean. Dean thinks that this is the most excellent thing in the world and begins walking a little more briskly than usual just so Sam has to run full-tilt alongside him.
When Dean has reached his destination, his destination being ‘just far away enough from his starting point for his newly-miniaturised brother to be completely exhausted’, Sam braces himself against a nearby flowerpot to catch his breath for a moment, then climbs up Dean’s pant leg until he’s close enough to make proper eye contact and gives him a look of purest hatred.
“Oh, fine,” Dean says. “You can ride on my shoulder until we figure this out.”
Sam dodges Dean’s fingers - “Dean. You're not picking me up” - and climbs up to his shoulder himself. He leans against the side of Dean's face, holding onto the hair at the back of his neck with tiny fingers.
“I hope I turn back to normal size when I’m still sitting on you,” he mutters. “Jerk.”
-
The problem with the situation - well, one of the problems, at least - is that the supernatural world isn’t going to put itself on hold just because Dean’s brother is suddenly small enough to fit in his pocket. They need to figure out what's happened to him, sure, but there are still people to be saved, and hell if Dean’s going to let them die just because he’s too busy trying to make his brother’s situation less hilarious.
They're pretty sure the thing they’re looking for here is a Gorgon, because there aren’t many other explanations when people start mysteriously disappearing and leaving perfect statues of themselves in a nearby forest, so Sam is busy researching the freaky things on his laptop in their motel room. It’s taking him frickin’ forever, ’cause he has to crawl over the keyboard and push each key down individually, but he glares whenever Dean tries to help out.
“I can do this, Dean,” he snaps, swatting Dean’s comparatively-huge finger away and losing his balance in the process. He falls face-first onto the keys. A row of ‘x’s marches across the screen.
Dean slides a hand under his brother’s belly and lifts him gently off the keyboard. Sam glares daggers at him, his arms and legs dangling. He really, really hates being picked up like this. Which is a pity, because Dean loves picking him up. It makes him feel like a giant.
“If you don’t put me down,” Sam says, “I’m going to hide in your pants and tell every girl who unzips them that you’ve got chlamydia.”
Dean lets go. Sam yelps and twists in mid-air and lands with a hilariously indignant noise on the bed.
There’s only one bed in the room; Sam was hiding when Dean checked in, clinging to the inside of his jacket, and ordering two queens for one person would’ve looked pretty weird. Besides, as Dean takes great delight in pointing out, the brand new pocket-sized Sam isn't exactly going to need a whole queen bed to himself.
Pocket-sized Sam rolls over onto his stomach, crawls up the comforter to the head of the bed and sprawls full-length over the pillow.
“Hey,” Dean says, nudging Sam’s foot with a finger. “I get the bed. I’m not the one who can fit in a box, remember?”
“Screw you,” Sam mutters into the pillow. “I’m not sleeping in the box.”
“Come on, Sammy,” Dean says, exasperated. “I’ve lined it with cotton balls and everything.”
“I’m not a hamster, Dean,” Sam says, rolling over to glare at him. Sam’s been doing a lot of glaring since this started. Dean’s not sure he realises exactly how unintimidating he is.
-
They try sharing at first, Sam under strict instructions to stay on his fifth of the bed, but he can’t sleep; the blankets completely dwarf him, weighing too heavily on his chest, and he can’t get comfortable. Midway through the night he nudges Dean awake and asks for one of his T-shirts. Dean, despite being half-asleep and a little confused, manages to comply, and Sam curls up in the shirt and falls asleep on the pillow, his tiny breaths barely rustling Dean’s hair.
-
The next morning, Sam rolls over and yawns, then screws up his face. “I really need a shower.”
“You can’t have a shower,” Dean, who has spent the past twenty minutes trying to resist the urge to buy a helium balloon and tie his sleeping miniature brother to it, says. “You’ll drown.”
Sam blinks his eyes open, clearly confused, and then lets them fall closed again in exasperation when he remembers what’s happened to him. When what Dean has said registers, he re-opens them in order to give him an incredulous look. “How short do you think I am?”
“The water drops’ll knock you over or something. I don’t know; something just tells me that putting a little you in a man-size shower’s probably a bad idea.”
“Okay, fine,” Sam says, rolling his eyes. “What am I supposed to do, then?”
Dean takes a moment to consider this.
“I guess I could hold you under the faucet or something,” he says.
“Dude,” Sam says, staring. “I’d be naked.”
“So?”
“So I’m not having you holding me when I’m naked. It’s bad enough when I’ve got my pants on.”
“Oh, come on,” Dean says. “You’re ten inches tall. It’s too weird to be inappropriate.”
“I’ll just wash in the sink,” Sam mutters.
-
Sam has trouble reading the laptop screen when he’s this small, and so, after struggling for some time, he gives up and officially delegates the research for this case to Dean. Dean complains, but, as his method of research consists mainly of pulling corrupted snippets of legends from his not-entirely-reliable memory and waiting for Sam to refute them, it’s not as arduous a task as he makes out.
“So all we have to do is get this ugly sonofabitch to look at itself in the mirror, right?” Dean asks. “Easy.”
“Uh, no,” Sam says. “I don’t think that’s it.”
“Why not? It’s what the Greek guy did.”
“Perseus,” Sam says. “And no, it isn’t. What he did was use the reflection in his shield so he could behead her without looking directly at her. If the reflection turned people to stone, he wouldn’t have survived.”
“You think it has to be a beheading, then?” Dean asks. “We can’t just shoot it? What if we send you in and have you hack at its ankles until it dies of blood loss?”
“Well,” Sam says, perching on the edge of the keyboard, “as Gorgon blood apparently turns into poisonous snakes, that probably wouldn’t be such a good idea. Although I guess not being at her eye level might be an advantage. If, you know, I could actually wield a sword like this.”
Dean groans. “Swords? You’re kidding. It’s got to be a sword?”
“Well, that’s what Perseus used,” Sam says, frowning. “I guess he didn’t have that many options at the time, though.”
“Sam,” Dean says, leaning forward, “has anyone tried shooting a Gorgon?”
-
They try shooting the Gorgon. It doesn’t work.
The first three shots don’t work because aiming when you’re blindfolded and your tiny brother is shouting directions up from where he’s tied to your leg is really fucking difficult. Sam’s being annoyingly cautious about this case, pointing out that they don’t know a real-life Gorgon’s reflection won’t be deadly, and when they called Bobby to ask he just thought they’d gone crazy because apparently nobody’s come across one of these for three billion years or something, so there’s not much hope of getting any more information. Which is why Sam, so low down he won’t be able to look into the bitch’s eyes unless he tries really hard, is yelling, “Left! Left! Okay, I think you might be aiming too low for a heart-shot. Go up a little. I don’t know, about an inch? Hey, you try giving directions when all you can look at is someone’s legs.”
The fourth and fifth shots don’t work because apparently bullets just don’t have much of an effect on Gorgons, and that’s when they find out that Gorgons can run really fast when they’re pissed off.
Dean tears off the blindfold in their flight, and he bolts through the forest and back to the Impala. They don’t know when it gives up the pursuit, because they can’t look back.
-
Obviously, Sam’s only got one set of clothes in his size - well, he was wearing like three shirts when he got tinified, so it’s not that bad, but he still doesn’t seem to think it’s enough - and so, because Dean is a good brother, he goes out early the next morning and comes back with a bag full of dolls’ clothes.
Sam doesn’t seem to appreciate his thoughtfulness. And, all right, so maybe most of what Dean’s got is a bit frillier than what his brother usually wears, but it still seems pretty ungrateful.
“You’d probably look great in it,” Dean says, dangling the blue-and-white Little Bo Peep frock in front of him. “You need to open your mind, Sammy.”
“I really wish you’d enjoy this less.”
-
Of course, all of this is more to put off the ‘what next?’ conversation than anything else, because guns won’t work and Dean’s got a feeling Sam’s not going to like his latest sudden flash of inspiration.
The feeling turns out to be pretty accurate.
“It’s a Scooby-Doo plan,” Sam says, incredulous.
“Hey, the Scoobies always got the bad guy in the end. You won’t let me use a mirror, and I really don’t feel like a blindfolded swordfight, so this is the only option we’ve got.”
“There’s got to be something else,” Sam says. “Something less... stupid.”
“How tall do you think it is?” Dean asks, ignoring him.
“My height perception’s a little thrown off right now, Dean,” Sam says, gesturing at the clock radio he’s sitting on. “Maybe we should go with the reflection thing after all. I mean, everything else we know about her stays pretty close to the myth.”
“You said its blood turns into snakes,” Dean points out. “Did it bleed when I shot it?”
“There was some blood before it healed, but I didn’t see any snakes.” Sam hesitates, then says, reluctantly, “Okay, so we probably shouldn’t risk it.”
“I got it in the heart, right? So...” Dean closes his eyes and mimics aiming a gun, trying to remember. “It’s probably about your height. Well,” he adds, with a grin, because he can’t help himself, “not any more.”
“As soon as we fix this height thing,” Sam says, “I’m never speaking to you again.”
-
Dean’s pretty sure that Sam keeps directing him into trees on purpose. He’d yell, but he doesn’t want to let the Gorgon know they’re around before they have to. And, if he’s totally honest with himself, he does kind of deserve it.
“I can see her legs,” Sam says, grimly. “I think she’s facing away from us, but turn around before you take the blindfold off.”
Dean pulls off the blindfold and stares fixedly at the tree in front of him as he unties his brother from his leg. As soon as he’s free, Sam turns to make sure their target hasn’t heard them.
“Seriously, Sam,” Dean says, quietly. “You don’t want to do this, we won’t do it.”
Sam laughs. “Well, it’s good to know you care.”
“You want to figure something else out?”
“Nah.” Sam pats him on the ankle. It’s probably supposed to be a reassuring gesture, but it’s a little freaky, because those tiny tiny hands will never not be weird. “I figure it’ll be good to know I can still do something when I’m like this.”
Dean grins. “Okay. Yell if you need me to get you out of there.” He really hopes that Sam’s not going to need to be rescued, because trying to find his little-in-more-than-one-sense brother without looking into the eyes of the thing chasing him isn’t really his idea of fun, but if it comes down to it they both know he’ll jump in.
Sam nods and sets off. Dean watches him go, then, remembering that he’s going to be in a lot of trouble if the Gorgon turns around, turns and escapes through the trees.
-
It turns out to be more difficult to provoke a Gorgon than Sam expected. Shooting her managed it last time, but he doesn’t have a gun, and he’s pretty sure he wouldn’t be able to handle it even if he did. He tries calling her an ‘ugly whore’, unconsciously mimicking Dean’s voice as he says it, but she seems unperturbed; perhaps she doesn’t understand, or she can tell it’s half-hearted, or perhaps insulting mythical monsters is just an incredibly stupid strategy. He almost looks up to see if she has a readable expression before catching himself.
One thing that makes this easier is the fact that Gorgons apparently don’t have human levels of intelligence. Sam’s not sure he’d want to face something smart enough to figure out that all it has to do to make his job a whole lot harder is crouch down. As it is, he’s pretty sure she doesn’t actually know why her stare of death isn’t working on him. Now he just has to get her pissed enough to try to kill him by other means.
So he picks up a rock and throws it at her.
It’s a tiny, tiny rock, small enough to fit comfortably in his much-smaller-than-usual hand, and she barely seems to notice. When he finds a larger pebble and flings it, she makes a grunting noise and the snakes on her head hiss, but that’s it. He can’t throw large things and he can’t throw with much strength, and if he takes too long Dean’s going to assume he’s in trouble and come charging in to get himself killed, so he’s got to try something different, and words cannot express how little he wants to do this but it’s the only idea he’s got.
As luck would have it, it turns out that Gorgons really, really don’t like it when tiny people try to climb up their legs. She roars, and Sam leaps off and backs away quickly, and then she gives chase and fuck, fuck, because Gorgons can run stupidly fast and tiny Sams really can’t and whose brilliant idea was this again?
Sam runs as hard as he can, dodging between trees and through snarled Gorgon fingers, and he knows, he knows he’s going to be caught and fed to this woman’s hair and he can’t call for help because then Dean will die too and he was concentrating so hard on getting away that he probably isn’t even going in the right direction and -
- and then he spots the two trees with the white paint splashed across them as a marker and dives between them, the Gorgon so close he can feel the rags she wears brushing his arm, but only one of them is tall enough to have her head cut off by the razor-thin wire stretched between the trunks.
-
“In the legend, the Gorgon’s head could still turn people to stone even after she’d died,” is the first thing Sam says to Dean when they meet at the edge of the forest.
Dean raises his eyebrows. “You got it, then?” he asks, carefully not letting on how relieved he is or how fucking frustrating it is to know that your brother is in danger and not to be able to help.
“Pretty sure,” Sam says. He tries to climb up Dean’s leg to get to his shoulder, but he’s clearly exhausted, and Dean takes pity on him and scoops him up into his hands. Sam gives him a half-hearted glare. “I heard something hit the ground, anyway. Didn’t turn around, because, y’know.” He glances back the way he came. “How do we stop some kid finding the head and getting himself killed?”
Dean grins.
-
When Sam starts calling for help from the bathroom, Dean keeps watching the news for just long enough to make sure everything’s under control before opening the door. Sam may be able to bathe in the sink, but he can’t get into or out of it on his own, so he needs Dean to lift him up. It’s one of those things they don’t talk about.
“What’re they saying about the forest fire?” Sam asks, as Dean wraps him in a hand towel. “Dean, just give me the towel, I’ll do it.”
“Yeah, they’re pretty sure it’s arson,” Dean says. “Didn’t get to any residential areas, though. Thanks to the helpful, handsome young man who called 911 before it could get too out of control.” He nods toward the screen, deliberately widening his eyes. “They’re thinking the aim was to cover up a murder, ’cause they found a body that had been ‘mysteriously beheaded’ before it was burned. Haven’t been able to identify it yet.”
Sam just frowns. Dean passes him a celebratory bottle-cap of beer, but he ignores it.
“Dean,” he says, after a moment. “What are we going to do about my height?”
“We have to do something? I kind of like you like this. It means you don’t keep running off on your own.”
“I’m serious, Dean,” Sam says, disappearing under the towel and dragging his clothes with him. A couple of minutes later, he emerges again, fully-dressed. “I can’t just live like this.”
And maybe Dean was only half-joking when he said it’s good to know where Sam is all the time, but he knows it’s true. “Yeah, all right,” he says, digging his cell out from under his jacket. “I’ll call Bobby.”
-
Dean knows Bobby’s still there, because he can hear his breathing down the line, but this is a hell of a long pause. Not that he wasn’t expecting it.
“Right,” Bobby says, eventually. “Just making sure I heard right: Sam’s...?”
“Ten inches tall,” Dean confirms.
“Ten inches tall.”
“Maybe eight; I don’t know. We haven’t broken out a tape measure or anything.”
“Okay,” Bobby says, slowly. “I’m not sure the exact height is the problem here. And, what, you just forgot to mention this when you called me about that Gorgon?”
“We had other things to take care of,” Dean says, with an entirely pointless shrug. “You ever hear of anything like this happening before?”
Another pause. Shorter, but not by much.
“No.”
“Right,” Dean says, glancing over at his brother. Sam is trying to read the newspaper he left on the bed, but he’s obviously having trouble; he has to walk over the pages as he reads, because he’s too close to the text to read it all from one point. “Only I was kind of hoping you’d know how to fix it.”
“You say you weren’t fighting anything when it happened?” Bobby asks. “You were just walking along?”
“Yeah, that’s right.”
“Probably a Trickster,” Bobby says. “Elves might be able to do something like that, but they’d need to be provoked. A Trickster could just have been bored.”
“Honestly, I’d have expected you to figure it out sooner,” Sam says.
Dean whips around, forgetting the phone. Sam is leaning against the headboard of the bed, smirking in a way that doesn’t seem like him at all.
“I mean, you’ve already taken on a Trickster, right?” Sam asks, inspecting his miniature fingernails. “And you still needed your beloved Bobby to tell you what you were dealing with. I’d have thought it’d be more memorable than that.”
Dean grabs for his gun. Sam raises his eyebrows.
“Yeah, I wouldn’t do that. You wouldn’t want to hurt your brother, would you?”
“You’re not my brother,” Dean says, keeping the handgun trained on him.
“Maybe not, but I’m borrowing his body. If you want it back in one piece, I’d suggest you put the gun down.”
Dean doesn’t lower the gun. Sam rolls his eyes.
“Look, even if you shoot you won’t kill me. I’m just trying to keep you from doing anything stupid. Believe it or not, I actually like you two.”
“You’ve been in there the whole time?” Dean asks, ignoring him.
Sam laughs. “Of course not. Where’s the fun if I don’t get to see how much it annoys little Sammy?”
“Change him back,” Dean says. “And don’t call him that.”
“Oh, fine,” Sam says. “If you want to be boring.” And then he’s tall again. There’s no weird wavy light effect or puff of smoke or anything; Sam’s just suddenly a giant again, and all is well in the world. Or would be, if it weren’t for the fact that a freakin’ Trickster is still possessing Dean’s brother.
“Get out,” Dean says.
“What? I’m Sam! Can’t you tell from my puppy eyes and repression?”
“Get out,” Dean says, “or I swear I’ll figure out a way to kill you.”
“Yeah, like that’s a threat. Your Trickster-killing track record isn’t as good as you think it is, y’know.”
Dean blinks. “What?”
Sam winks at him, and then he’s doubled over, coughing, and Dean immediately forgets everything the Trickster just said. He rushes over to steady him, and Sam looks at him with an expression of confusion that’s all Sam, and Dean is almost relieved enough to hug him. Almost.
They stay there for a moment, holding onto each other, and then Dean becomes aware of the phone he left on the floor. Bobby is calling his name down the line. Dean picks it up.
“Dean, I swear, if you don’t say something in the next five seconds I’m coming down there myself.”
“It’s fine,” Dean says. “Everything’s fine. Sam’s back to normal. Well, not ‘normal’, but you know what I mean.”
Bobby says something in response, but Dean doesn’t catch it because Sam has just whacked him on the back of the head.
“It was a Trickster, like you said,” Dean explains, rubbing his skull. “I think it’s over now, though.”
“You sure?” Bobby asks, and Dean can hear the frown in his voice. “Tricksters aren’t known for giving up easy.”
“Pretty sure,” Dean says. “I mean, I think we’re both okay.”
-
Dean wakes up in Sam’s pocket, and he’s never seen Sam looking so gleeful in his life.